TWO BIBLICAL CHALLENGES TO FIGURE OUT

TWO BIBLICAL CHALLENGES TO FIGURE OUT
By
Bill Cottringer

“Life's challenges are not supposed to paralyze you, they're supposed to help you discover who you are.” ~Bernice Johnson Reagon

There are two very powerful Biblical challenges that have provoked me for years in the search for their true meanings and intended applications. They are the words:

1. “Man was made in God’s image.”
2. “The truth will set you free.”

I have always sensed that these two challenges were very inter-connected.

With the first challenge, each year I seem to be seeing a bigger picture of that meaning, but I think I may have stumbled upon the real intention of the original challenge—to understand what part of “image’ in which we resemble God most. And the most important part of the image similarity is the awesome power of belief. Over and over again throughout the history of civilization God has proven the power of His belief in us using our free will to eventually do the right thing—love one another. Granted, it takes some of us a little longer to get it, but eventually we all do.

Belief is an unconscious code in which we speak back to God. It is a wholesome combination of thoughts and feelings that project their energy back to the universe without the normal verbal chance of miscommunication. Beliefs are communication at its best. There is no misunderstanding, miscommunication or misinterpretation. It is what it is.

Science has proven the power of belief to be the best reality repair tool there is. We are often part of realities that we don’t like and desperately want to change, but attacking these realities with our separate selves doesn’t ever seem to work. This is because all realities have an unconscious belief behind them that drives them. It is the belief that has to be changed if we are to be successful in changing the reality we don’t like and creating a better one to replace it.

In order to get into a graduate counseling program, I had to answer a very profound question that I couldn’t hide behind. The question was: Are people born basically good, bad or neutral. Luckily for me, I knew the right answer that a counselor needs to know—people are born neutral and quite capable of going to the left or the right, depending upon the beliefs they start accumulating and the experiences that confirm and continue them. But of course, they are always able to change the basic belief of this accounting system—no matter how it is stacked—with a little help from a wise counselor.

But, timing is everything in anything and there is always a point when we are more open to realizing the critical crossroads where we have to be at in order to begin making the right choices before we go past the point of no return without catching it in time. The crossroads we all come to is the one where we confront the reality of whether or not we are truly happy and successful from the choices we have made and the efforts we have put forth to progress in our journeys with the genetic gift of being made in God’s image. The truth that can set us free is “No not yet,” but “Yes I can starting right now.”

And if I grab hold of the right belief of how things are right now—God’s will or the Tao of life—I can’t help but move towards the promised land of abundance. Or on the other hand, if I believe something else to be true, I will likely continue wandering in the wilderness, presently called “the treadmill trap of overload to the no-where zone.” Are you at the crossroads and what belief do you have about your own power to remove the safety space between you and the realities you don’t like or the ones you want to happen?

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA, along with being a Sport Psychologist, Business Success Coach, Photographer and Writer living in the scenic mountains of North Bend. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, Re-Braining for 2000 (MJR Publishing), The Prosperity Zone (Authorlink Press), You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too (Executive Excellence), The Bow-Wow Secrets (Wisdom Tree), and Do What Matters Most and “P” Point Management (Atlantic Book Publishers), and Reality Repair Rx (Publish America) This article is an excerpt from an upcoming book Reality Repair. Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net